Bill Tammeus writes about religion and ethics.

August 25, 2007

Aug. 25-26, 2007

THE VALLEY OF DOUBT

Mother Teresa, it's reported, at times was tormented about what she felt was her lack of faith. Seems like a common experience. Has it not happened to you? Speaking of Mother Teresa, watch this space on Monday.

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REFLECTIONS ON 'GOD'S WARRIORS'

I have waited until this weekend to react here to this past week's TV series, "God's Warriors," on CNN, which sought to help us understand religious fanaticism in our era. That's because I wanted some time to absorb what was offered and to let it all settle a little.

If you missed the three parts, I hope you'll click on the link above and review at least what's offered online.

Some thoughts:

* The topic itself is among the most important of our day. Religious fanaticism has set many parts of the globe aflame with hatred and violence, and we simply must understand its roots so that we can, at minimum, defend against it but, even more, seek to limit it. So cheers to CNN for making a good-faith attempt at educating us.

* That said, I found that the effort CNN made to be fair and balanced resulted in giving the impression that today extremism in the three religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, is somehow equal. That's a silly notion. Yes, each religion has produced wild-eyed fanatics who believe they have a direct pipeline to God and that God sometimes wants them to murder others.

But to pretend that fanaticism in Judaism (with only 15 million or so Jews in the world) today is somehow commensurate with fanaticism in Christianity (with about 2 billion adherents) or Islam (with more than 1 billion followers) is delusional. And to suggest that radical Christians today are causing the level of violence through terrorism that radical Islamists are causing is irresponsible.

CNN did not directly equate the level of violence and upheaval created by "God's Warriors" in each of the three religions, but by reserving one night for each faith, it gave the impression that each faith was producing an equal amount of damage. Perhaps viewers would have been better served by a thematic organization rather than a by-religion account.

* I also found problematic the label "God's Warriors" as somehow equally befitting all radicals of each faith. But perhaps that's just the danger that headline writers always face. Some so-called "warriors" are a clear and present danger to themselves and everyone while others are simply intellectual kooks. Still others who might willingly accept the label of being a warrior for God are rational people of deep religious commitment who do much more good than harm.

* Much of what was presented was simply history. I found that especially true in the opening segment, which focused so heavily on how things in the Middle East got to this point. It was a good primer, perhaps, for young people who have not lived through the last several decades, but I frankly didn't learn much from it. But re-running history was also a heavy emphasis in the segment devoted to Islamists. And the Christian segment devoted a great deal of time to the history of such movements as the Moral Majority. Again, it seemed like a rehash.

* And yet I was pleased to see CNN pay attention to Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian about whom I wrote this in 2002: he "probably deserves to be called the primary thinker behind the radical version of Islam to which Osama bin Laden, the Taliban and other fanatics have pledged allegiance."

* LIttle things about the series bothered me. One example: The chief correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, at one point said, "the Jewish Bible, the Torah. . ." Well, the Jewish Bible is bigger than the Torah. Strictly speaking, the Torah is composed of the books of Genesis, Exodus, Levitucus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. To have the whole Jewish Bible one must add the Prophets (Nebiim) and the Writings (Ketubim). Sometimes Torah is used informally to refer to the whole Jewish Bible, but Amapour should have made clear that she understood the difference. As I say, it's a small matter, perhaps, but if you don't get the details right, viewers have a perfect right to wonder if they can believe your larger conclusions.

* Another little thing: In the Islam segment there was much talk of "martyrdom" without ever giving a good definition of it. Martyrdom in radical Islam has wrongly become synonymous with suicide, and they're quite different matters, as CNN should have pointed out. And speaking of word use, in the third segment she often used the term "Christian conservatives" without giving us much of a definition, and she described San Francisco as "perhaps the most liberal city in America," without telling us what she meant by that. Such labels, as I've often said, hide much more than they reveal.

* OK, one more little thing: Amanpour in the second segment said she "discovered" the Shia belief in the hidden, or 12th, imam. Oh, please. Anyone who has spent 10 minutes reading about Islam, especially Shia Islam, knows about that. If she didn't know about it until she started working on this series, it shows how remarkably ignorant she was. And I grew tired of her seeming to be shocked that Muslim women might choose to wear the hijab, or head scarf, without it meaning they were oppressed.

* In the first segment, Amanpour seemed to express astonishment that some Jews wore "Tefilin," sometimes spelled tefillin. It is, however, a common practice, especially among Hasidic adherents. And, in fact, Jewish law demands that all Jewish men older than 13 wear these square leather boxes and strips of leather, though for sure not all do.

* After acknowleding that the phrase "occupied territories" was controversial when referring to land Israel has controlled since the 1967 war, Amanpour nonetheless adopted the phrase as normative.

* And what I found missing from the series were enough calm, reflective, scholarly voices. But I suppose it's hard to make that seem interesting to people who think television somehow is calm, reflective and scholarly by nature.

* Amanpour and the CNN staff did a good job of finding people important to the story -- and getting them to talk on camera. But haven't we all by now seen and heard enough from the late Jerry Falwell and even from over-quoted scholar Karen Armstrong? At least she was a reflective voice, but I wanted a fresher voice.

* But another thing I found missing was a strong acknowledgement that religion can and does also play an extraordinarly positive role in the world. Without such an acknowledgement, the series played into the simplistic idea that I criticized in a recent column that "religion causes violence," and thus can be dismissed as destructive and unhealthy. It would be possible to emerge from the CNN series with the impression that all religion is pretty much just mindless zealotry.

To read my latest Kansas City Star work, click here. (My Saturday column this weekend is about some impressions I drew from my recent trip to Poland.)

Comments

Religion may play an extraordinary role in doing good, but it is the nature of the beast that the harm done in God's name is especially grievous. As a Christian who belongs to a UU fellowship, I hear other UU's express how they were hurt by Christians. For example, I had a Jewish acquaintance look across a fellowship table at me and say, rather angrily, "I grew up having Christian friends in school tell me my people had killed Jesus." And I had a Native American acquaintance tell me, "So you're Christian. You're one of those people who think that if you don't believe in Jesus you're going to go to hell."

Mel.
Thank you for your last comment on yesterday's blog. I gave you a reply there also.

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Bill.
Your review of "God's Warriors" is excellent. I like God's Warriors because it had a lot of information for me, to show how we are in the Last Days of Life on Earth, and, showed so much of the Hate, Killing, Inhumanity and Inequality of Fallen Humans on their Home. Earth is Home for All, but who knows it? Jews, Christians, Muslims, or any religious group?

I also made a comment earlier on the Blog, about not knowing about the Hidden Imam, but I do know about the Twelve Imam, which is in my religious section, but had not heard the expression Hidden. I now can compare Jesus as Hidden also, as are all Saviors in other religions, as a matter of speech, until they reappear.

Your article in the K.C. Star, was also very good.
If Humans believe in the resurrection of the body at Judgement Day they can get hope and relief, by accepting all the dead will be raised again into physical bodies.

Humans have been Killing their Brothers/Sisters and their Home Planet ever since the Fall to Sin, up to our nuclear arsonal today.
We now have the High Tech to change our Killing Ways, and use our rational minds and our High Tech, for Life instead of for the Death of All Humas and All Life on our Home. We have not be very good Caretakers of our Planet Earth Home and the Life on it.

I'm still laughing out loud at the ridiculously superstitious sainthood process in the Catholic Church for Mother Teresa. Apparently a locket with a picture of Mother Teresa can heal, and that counts as a miracle that she performed! Of course you need two miracles to declare her the real deal. I'm thinking that the second miracle is that the Church might actually start laughing at itself for this bit of idiocy.

"This required proof of a miracle cure performed through her intercession, and in 2002 the Vatican recognised as a miracle the healing of a stomach tumour in an Indian woman, Monica Besra, who laid a locket containing Mother Teresa’s picture on her abdomen. A second miracle is required for the nun to proceed to canonisation."

Weird,
JT spouting about the Catholic Church. Remember when Jesus spit in the sand to make mud and healed the man's blindness? Remember how a woman was healed just by touching his garment? Well, I could give you a list a mile long of miracles associated with relics and physical objects. Of course, you'd have to accept sacramental theology and a God that works in wondrous and amazing ways first.
I guess I wonder how it is you are able to speak on such things without having any knowledge whatsoever of this miracle outside a news story. Ignorance of the subject, boxed in irrational theology, uninformed caterwauling... yep, sounds like the peanut gallery is back.

Bill, you make this series sound very interesting, though not for those who read extensively about these topics already. I would have like to have seen the series! I'll look for the DVD.

I'm sad, though, that Karen Armstrong is still talking about this stuff. I've read her, and she has a view that many think is "objective." Of course, on this topic there is no "objective" commentator.

Armstrong's view seems to me to be based on personal experience of the divine, and less on the religious text. The radicals of all these religions are zealous about the text of their religion--however they happen to interpret it. Because of this tendency I would think that Armstrong's views would be less relevant to the discussion than those who study these religions' texts.

The Temple of GOD is our Planet and the LIFE on it.
And Equal Humans were put here to Take Care of the Planet and the Life on it. We need to examine the text of religion writings, and find oug what made Human Unequal, and a better way to interpret scripture, than to keep Killing and destroying God's Home.
The Hymn 'I'm but a stranger here, Heaven is my home', does not mean we should not take 'Care' of God's Home while we visit here.

On a smaller level of God's Home, if God gave you the USA, and it was was your house and yard, and you were responsible to be the Caretaker for it; how would you and your family take Care of it. Make lots of trash dumps, and pollution, and pick fights with someone that was the Caretaker of Europe?
And use guns and bombs to blow holes in their yard, and kill their family?
Is this what we watched for three nights on CNN? And the rest of the time on the News? How many holes has the USA made in the neighbor's yards of God's Home? We usually know what our neighbors are doing, but never look at ourselves.

How do you think God feels when he looks down on his Home and sees what the Caretakers and their Neighbor Caretakers are doing to it.
We cannot blame all the destruction we do to God's Home on tornado's and floods. They are caused by the Human's destructive Killing Lifestyle, and their Unbalanced Eco System because of their Pollution and Trash. Who 'Cares"? Who Cares about Louisiana?

Does anyone Care what God thinks? Or is this the wrong interpretation of religious writings, about God putting Humans on Earth to be the Caretakers? We need to understand what turned the Caretakers into Killers, and try to at least Unite, and try to clean up God's Home, and stop Killing our Brothers/Sisters, the Eco System, the Land Area. and our Oceans and Rivers. Each person should have a place to live, and enough food and clothing, and then get started on the Housecleaning of God's Home. How much longer can we live in this filth?

Speakin of Qtub, there is an interesting movie called "The Power of Nightmares" by Adam CurtiS available online about the rise of Islamic Fundamentalism and how it parallels neo-conservatism from Strauss to Kristol. It is worth a look.

Now that Karl Rove is no longer the spin-meister for Bush, he could now hire the reverend who spins Mother Teresa's doubt into real faith:

Rev Kolodiejchuk maintains that Mother Teresa did not suffer “a real doubt of faith”, but that, on the contrary, her agonising demonstrates her faith in God’s reality. “We cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us . . . Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic,” he said.

Mother Theresa's experience was anything but common. It was deeply mystical and is often referred to as the "dark night of the soul". I suggest you read Prayer Primer or Fire Within both written by Thomas Dubay for more information about this.

This is not on the subject, of Human's inhumanity to Humans, but it is about Fallen Humans and Scripture.
I have posted about the book, "Debates on the "Meaning of Life", Evolution and "Spiritualism".
Now about "Evolution" by Joseph McCabe, d.1955 and George McCready Price, d. 1963. The Evolution Theory Knowledge was spreading.
A debate in London England. McCabe says similar things that Evolutionists say.
"Price: Mark what I am going to say now: Geologists do not actually know anything at all about the alleged relative ages of the various fossils. - But how does the relative order of the fossils here in England give us any guarantee of the order in which we will find these very same fossils in Australia, in India, or in the United States? - (Index of fossils) Next, we have these conditions exactly reversed - not that the rocks are really upside down, but the order of the index fossils is exactly the reverse of the evolutionary order. That is, rocks that are called very "young" because of the fossils they contain are below, while others called very "old" because of their fossils are found lying upon them in what looks like a perfectly normal way; and these amazing relationships may extend for hundreds of miles. -

"(Drawings of prhistoric man with a mastodon or some other kind of elephant, depicted in the attitude of striking a man over the head with its trunk.) - Obviously, the prehistoric man who made this drawing must either have seen a dinosaur alive, or he must have received a good decription of the animal from some human being who had seen such an animal alive. The picture is almost the exact duplicate of that on the outside cover of my honorable apponent's 'The A B C of Evolution'. Yet one scientist, when shown this drawing, said: "It cannot be a dinosaur; that is impossible. For we know that the dinosaurs were extinct twelve million years before man appeared on Earth".

On my web site I list the Bible verses about the Noah/Atlantis Flood. It started when Noah was 600 years old. Noah went into the Ark, and a 7 days later the rain started, and rained for 40 days/nights. I say this raised the Ark up off the ground to float. People using the measurements of the Ark, have said it would be as as large as the Titanic Oceanliner. When we accept that Noah and High Tech Atlantis were the same Society before the Planetary Flood, this type of building a ship was normal. We have Primitive and High Tech Humans on Earth today.
(The Ozone and Ice-Crystal Canopies were set up at Colonization of Earth, to protect Life from the ultraviolet rays of the Sun.)

After the rain began, the windows of heaven broke open (Ice-Crystal Canopy), and the fountains of the deep broke (earthquake action).
I was made aware that the Ice-Crystal Canopy 'fell' and broke the one land mass into two sections like we have today, with the Arctic and Atlantic Oceans the dividing line for the two hemisperes. Atlantis also broke in two in the middle, and sank.
After 5 months the rain stopped. The Earth was under water and as the water drained, the tidal wave or tsunami waves, washed the floating debree of humans, animals, fish and fowl, grass, trees, bushes, etc. and buried them as the waters subsided, all over the planet. This took another 6 months. So when Noah stepped out of the Ark, he was 601 years old, and the second month and seven and twentieth day of the month, the earth was dried. This accounts for the 7 days Noah was in the Ark before it rained and the 40 days and nights of rain. Noah was in the Ark, 1 year, 1 month and 27 days.
This is in Genesis 6-8.

This is how Genesis is handed down, and Noah probably landed where it had drained some. The draining and tidal wave action may have continued longer in other parts. Then Earth was repopulated and during the last 100 years we also had a population and knowledge explosion like the Society of Noah and Atlantis had.

Breaking the Ice-Crystal Canopy, changed the Eco System. Some say it did not rain before the flood, but a mist watered the land. The rain began on Earth and the rainbow appeared and the seasons began. God promised there would not be another Flood like this, and it is because there is not another Ice-Crystal Canopy to break. The Noah/Atlantis Society broke the Ice-Crystal Canopy with their High Tech pollution and nuclear weapons of massive destruction. Now, since 1900, we have had a population explosion from 1 billion to over 6 billion people, and we are about the break the Ozone Canopy with our High Tech pollution, and nuclear weapons of massive destruction that will cause the Planetary Fire Judgement of Man on Earth.

The grass, trees, etc., made the coal, and the humans and animals made the chalk, oil and gas deposits. As the wave action went back and forth it was covered by dirt. We have all kinds of dirt mounds all around the planet, and bones etc., are found in coal deposits and other fossil layers.
The Earth's Axis was changed from the impact of the Canopy, and the Ice settled at the two poles. There are records of the Ice receeding from the temporate zones as people repopulated the Earth. Ice caves were also found as they moved around as the temporate zone expanded.

The Christian Bible, Scriptures and Myth can prove Earth was Colonized, and Life did not Evolve on our Planet, but was started by High Tech Colonization and Reproduction, like we are re-learning today, with our Population and Knowledge explosion, just as it happened to the the Noah/Atlantis Society.
So I say the Last Days are here. There are no more protective Canopies to protect Life as we know it from the ultraviolet rays from the Sun. When we break the Ozone Canopy, that is the End for Humans on Earth.

Our High Tech Ancestors that Colonized Life on Earth, and Jesus, who is with them, are Alive in Human Bodies, and will return before all Life is destroyed, as the Christian Bible teaches.
Will we know and Accept these Aliens from Space as our Saviors?

I have a statement by McCabe on his second turn to speak.
"I have been challenged to put before you some theory of the method of Evolution. You did not come to hear any quarrel about the method of evolution. You came to hear perhaps one quarrel - namely, whether the method was natural or supernatural. Why did I not enlarge upon that? For a simple reason that will occur to everybody. I assumed, as every philosopher - I was a professor of philosophy at one time - and everybody with common sense does, that when you are dealing with processes in nature you assume them to be natural until somebody proves them to be nonnatural. As to which particular process or method it was, here in the handbill inviting you to the debate, and you will see from it that I have not unertaken to indicate any particular natural process, but to show that the animals and planets of the world were evolved from one or more primitive forms by natural processes. I understood it was for my opponent to bring in the theological question if he wished to prove that the natural processes were inadequate and you must bring in a supernatural agency. I am not supposed to mention it until he shows the inadequacy of the natural processes. If now he introduces the subject, I cannot reply or give you my opinion upon what he ways."

I accept the Truth of the supernatural agency is our High Tech Ancestors and the Super'natural' Colonization of Life on Earth.
Genesis 1 gives the steps of Colonization, as well as they could be used for Evolution. Until, we again returned to the High Tech Knowledge of Colonization, Creation and now Intelligent Design by a Supernatural God, was used to prove the Evolution theory was wrong.
Super'natural' Intelligent Design Creation 'is' High Tech Colonization, and the proof today, is our scientists are considering Colonizing another planet, and the first step is to change the atmosphere around a planet, before taking Life species in. So it is not a super'natural' act anymore. Humans need to accept the super'natural' power of the Gods of religion, is High Tech.
The High Tech Reproduction of Adam and Eve, is not a supernatural God mystery anymore either, since we can start Human Life in a dish in the lab, without the sex act. Does this make us Gods also, to reproduce without the sex act?

So are we ready to understand about the 'literal' reality, that Life was Colonized by High Tech Human Beings, not Gods, mistranslated by Fallen Humans after the High Tech Knowledge was lost, when Humans started reproducing Humans by Body Birth?

The Point is, that Fallen Man needs this 'Body Birth' 'Fallen' 'Nature' Lifestyle experience to see, that Greed, Inequality, Inhumanity, Haves and Havenot, and Killing God's Temple of Life, our Planet and All the Life Species and Eco System, is not the 'High Tech' Colonization, and Equal 'High Tech' Birth 'Nature' Lifestyle, that was set up on Earth 'in the beginning'

We need Agape Love for God and our Brothers/Sisters of LIFE, not Nuclear Weapons anad Pollution, to Take Care of God's Temple, Planet Earth. What Kind of Caregivers are the Humans on God's Temple, our Earth, today?

Well, it's good to see everyone is still alive and kicking. I was beginning to wonder - the board had been pretty much silent for a week or two (well, not silent, but much "quieter."

JT - you seem like two different people to me. You have such a good grasp of Scripture and bring out some really good points at times. That is in sharp contrast to what you say about anyone or anything Catholic.

Give Mother Teresa the benefit of the doubt. She did persevere in her faith, regardless of her perceived lack of connection with God. My wife reminded me of the Hebrews Hall of Faith - most all examples of faith given were people who had long periods of time not hearing from God and might have felt like Teresa did. Abraham is a good example of this. And even though he didn't feel it, he believed and obeyed and ultimately persevered. Judge the tree by the fruit. She bore some good fruit in her life.

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About Me

Who is Bill?I'm the former Faith columnist for The Kansas City Star. For a more detailed bio, look under the "Check this out" headline below. My Twitter handle is @BillTammeus. Friend me on Facebook and you'll see this blog every day in your feed.